The Snowing and Greening of Thomas Passmore (7 page)

The first time I visit Kate's house, she's waiting at the Abetsby bus stop for me. On one side of her street is a long, brick wall of an empty shoe factory – the name
KETCHELL SHOES
in faded white lettering taking up half the length – while on the other side, flanked by the row of pollarded trees lining the pavement, are the red-brick terraced houses built by Mr Ketchell for his workers. Between the pavement and entrance porch of each house is little more than a yard of fenced garden.

Knowing her parents are waiting to check me out, I count the houses and grip her hand too tight.

“You're hurting,” she says and laughs. “Relax.”

I nod. I've been to other girls' houses before, to call for them, but this is different.

“They'll like you,” she tells me. “They do already. Mum loves the plant you gave me. She's made a cake for you. She doesn't often bake cakes. It'll be alright.”

“Yeah.”

“Tom.”

I take a deep breath.

She strokes my hand and whispers, “Just don't let on you've shagged me silly.”

“No.”

There's about eighteen houses in the street, and above each porch a corbel stone with a motif created in relief. On the first is a sheaf of corn, above the second a fish, then a bird flying, a torch with a flame, a flower, a dolphin… until we come to Kate's house and what I take to be an image of a smiling sun.

She leans closer to my ear: “Thought I'd tell them later how much we enjoy fucking one another.”

“Okay.”

“Tom, relax! You look like you're going to your own funeral.”

Mr and Mrs Hainley are nervous too, and we do the small-talk thing, which is okay: what I'm studying, what my interests are, my part-time job. We sip mugs of tea, bite into slabs of cherry cake, chew our way through the weather, the garden and beer-making, Kate's university applications, until we're nodding and laughing and leaning back in our chairs.

“I like the stone carvings on the front of the houses,” I say. “That sun –”

“The corbel stones?” her dad says. He's got a soft Liverpudlian accent and I wonder that Kate hasn't picked up the same inflections. “They're a nice detail, aren't they? All the houses Mr Ketchell built have individual touches like that. They're not always obvious, but they're there for sure.”

“Except it's not the sun on ours, Tom,” Mrs Hainley adds. “They're not sunrays coming out of its face, although most people swear black and blue they are.” She winks at Kate. “Go and have another look, love. Take him, Kate. You two don't want to spend your afternoon sitting with us.”

Kate leads me outside and throws her arms around me. “See, you survived.”

“You've got cool parents. I like them.”

She looks back at the house. “They're not bad. We usually get on okay. They like you. I can tell.”

I peer up at the corbel stone. “Still looks like the sun to me.”

“Look closer. Stand on the wall if you want.”

Instead of sunrays, the round face has streams of leaves radiating from it. There are even leaves growing from its mouth and eyes.

“What is it? What's it supposed to be?”

“We call him George. Leafy George. He's the odd one out in some ways. He's the Green Man.”

And then her mum calls us to go to the shops. And that night, Kate makes gnocchi with tomato and mushroom sauce, and her dad tries his home-brew on me.

On the weekend when Kate's parents visit relatives, we fix it that I'll only work the morning on the market stall. Keeping to the back of the house, so neighbours won't see me if they call round, we wallow in an afternoon and night of forbidden delights; we play ‘at home' for eighteen precious hours. We, we, we. We're two parts of a whole.

Supper on the table is followed by love on the rug.

“So I'm
your light, your life, your everything
, am I?” she says, remembering the words I've written in a card to her. A card to accompany the bonsai sycamore I got for a song from the market.

“It's not very original, I know, but – well, yep, that's about the sum of it.”

Astride me on the floor, she unbuckles the belt of my jeans with a flourish.

She tickles me, I tickle her; our wrestling leads deliberately to this moment. And always will. She fumbles with the button to my jeans while I pull at the t-shirt tucked into her skirt. Mauve cotton scented with patchouli oil; black cheesecloth, flashes of gold, tassels and beads.

“Sounds a bit romantic to me,” she scoffs.

“Romantic's okay, isn't it?” I unclip her bra strap the way she's taught me; she pushes back her shoulders to assist.

“Up to a point,” she says, leaning forward, pinching one of my nipples softly between her teeth, leaving a smile of saliva. Then she pauses and slowly licks the smile clean. “Keep me real though, eh, Tom. Don't romanticise me into someone I'm not. It's too much to live up to. I'm just Kate Hainley, who cops good and bad days like everyone else. I don't want to be perched on some bloody impossible pedestal. It's too far to fall. Okay?”

“Okay.” But I only half-hear as I fumble with the button on her skirt and tug at the zip.

Glory, glory, alleluia!

By the light of a flaring gas fire, we become explorers, mapping a route through jungles we're coming familiar with.

Come and come again. No need for hotwater bottles tonight.

“Mound of Venus,” she whispers. “
Mons veneris
.
Labia
.” Guiding my hand. “Gently.”

“Petals,” I say, tracing a passage. I'm reminded of a crimson pæony unfurling at my fingertips; a moist, expectant darkness of pollen, charged and trembling at each touch.

“My clitoris,” she says, catching her breath. An overdue introduction.

She can give the names of things, summoning words and placing them where they belong. I'm in awe of that, know I have a library to learn, will have to browse the encyclopædia tomorrow.

“We've met,” I say.

“Careful,” she winces. “It's sensitive there. Not so rough.”

“One clear
It
or
Is of life
,” I murmur, stroking. Arainbow in the making.

“I like that,” she sighs. “And you. You too.”

Stumped for words and blushing, I whisper, “John Thomas,” and would shrug my shoulders if I could. “Say hello to John Thomas.”

She grins and greets me continental-style. “Bonjour, monsieur.”

Later, we share a bath and soap one another down, giggling over spilt suds. I place a dollop of bath foam on each of her loganberry nipples; she places the raspberry welt of a love bite on my shoulder – tutti-frutti nakedness. We play those games people play when one says, “If you could be absolutely anything you wanted, what would you be?” and, “If you ruled the world, what's the first new law you'd pass?” We talk of a life we might share together; we argue, we agree, we explore one another's views in depth and leave no tone unturned.

“Will you still love me when I'm middle-aged and fat?” she asks.

“I'll have grown old and fat too,” I tell her.

I'll go anywhere with Kate. For Kate. I will. I'll go to the ends of the earth and back for her. She'll always be beautiful to me.

“It's different for men.”

“You'll always be you and that's who I love,” I say. “Always. I'd need a lobotomy to stop loving you, and I'd deserve one if I did. You'll always be beautiful to me.”

“Easy to say now, Tom. Some men lust after younger women when they're middle-aged.” She pauses a moment, dabbles with the foam. “I wasn't gonna tell you this – thought you'd start getting all anxious again – but there was this guy on the bus the other day…'

She stops. I sit up. Water splashes onto the floor.

“And?”

“And… well, he just about told me his life story. But then he asked me out. He wanted to take me to some nightclub in London. Honestly, he must have been thirty-seven, thirty-eight – something like that.”

“He asked you out? Wanted to take you clubbing? That's sick. Did you tell him to piss off?”

“He was harmless really. Probably just lonely. A bit sad, if anything. I told him thanks but I have a boyfriend.”

“He probably had a wife and kids at home. Sick bastard.”

“Told me he was impotent.”

“He didn't?”

She nods.

“The bastard. He was probably hoping you'd offer to prove he wasn't.”

“You see what I mean though?”

“What a creep. Some blokes are like that. Not all. You're the one for me, Kate. Always and always. For better or for worse.”

“Sometimes people fall out of love, Tom.”

“I know that. But not us. Not me anyway. I'm hooked on you, Kate.”

“Yeah. Me too – with you. Weird, isn't it?”

In the night I wake because it's light outside. Brighter than moon-glow, it's the whiteness of snow bleaching the dark and saturating the drawn curtains. Sliding out of bed to stand at the window, I blink, wipe a patch of condensation off the glass and blink again. Kate's backyard is filled with pairs of white swans. All silent, all looking up at her window.

“Kate,” I say. “Kate.” But she's not in bed. She's gone. And I know this vision is because of her.

I hear a door shut downstairs and footsteps on the stairs.

“Kate,” I say, and meet her in the doorway.

“You've got nothing on. You'll catch your death of cold. Come back to bed.”

“Did you go outside?”

“I went for a pee.”

“Look outside,” I say, pulling the curtains back.

“Beautiful,” she says, and draws a smiley face on the glass with the tip of her finger.

There's thick fog and the swans have gone.

“Beautiful,” I say, and hold her tight as we snuggle into sleep again.

She leads me out of darkness into a new land and hands me an apple. No mean apple, the juice runs down my chin and creates an ocean at our feet. Kate loves me and therefore I exist. One day, when we've both left home, we'll plant the core of our love and let it grow. We need never be alone again. There'll be no maggot wriggling to eat its way out. What more could we want?

“Wake up, Tom,” she whispers. “Wake up.”

At six the next morning, she wraps the eiderdown around her naked body and goes downstairs to make me a mug of steaming coffee and a cheese sandwich. I tug the blanket over my eyes and slip into the warmth she's left behind.

“Wake up, Tom.”

Sleep. Let me sleep.

I don't want to wake up. I want to stay here forever with Kate. Under the blanket with Kate, lapping against one another.

Drifting.

But to avoid the prying eyes, the busy tongues, I untuck myself from her bed; I drag myself out the house and slide into the current of a mist-filled street. And am awake again.

Quickly, quickly.

I wink at Leafy George.

“Ssh, quietly, Major Tom.”

I keep my coat collar high, my head down, my footsteps soft. Happiness, though, has the clatter of a child playing a new drum and I can't help but kick up a beat that resounds through the old town as I pass one terraced house after another. I wake the starlings roosting on the telephone wires, make dogs growl in their sleep and disturb the dreams of married couples cuddling bum-to-lap in one bed after another after another.

Who cares that it's bitter cold and the bus is forty minutes late? I'm drawn tight against the chill, knowing Kate's only a few hundred yards away huddled in our shared bed, and I'm full to bursting with the memory of our day together and with the life that lies ahead.

In Kate's company I watch the months come and go, the seasons turn. The days grow longer, the nights shorter. The trees in her street bud into leaf, miraculously, and masses of fresh shoots sprout out the pollarded trunks in tufts, but at least they're trees again.

On May Day, which falls shortly before the first of her exams, we take her books and have a picnic in the park. There are maypole dancers and morris dancers and a mummers play:
St George and the Dragon
. We spread out on a tartan blanket, as if the earth's our house-without-walls and the cloudless sky our roof. We study, we talk, we discuss our future together, we map out a holiday we'll take as soon as her exams are over and I've finished school.

A short distance from where we lay, St George fights Slasher the Saracen again, while Beelzebub waits to one side.

“This stuff's timeless,” I say. “Don't you love it? We've been fighting the devil with these rhymes for centuries. Some things never change. I was in a mummers play when I was at primary school, you know. I can still remember the lines.”

She lets her Biology text fall shut. “Who were you? Not the bleeding-hearted St George, I hope? I always want the dragon to win. The self-righteous bastard deserves to be eaten.”

“No, the Doctor. I had an old Gladstone bag with a saw, a mallet and a drill, jars of medicine and such. I brought the Saracen back to life.”

“You like that old stuff, don't you?”

“It's who we are. It's where we come from.”

St George stands next to his newly-won bride and the Fool enters the arena.

She rolls onto her side to face me. “Yeah, it's good, but sometimes I reckon this country's so wrapped up in its past –
Land of Hope and Glory
, the old school tie and all that elitist crap – that nothing fresh or new or different can ever properly thrive. One shouldn't be at the expense of the other. It suits the rich bastards, the politicians, the industrialists, the bankers, to keep things the way they've always been.”

I sit up. “Yeah, like how they go on about the ‘Westminster System' and how it's so frigging democratic simply because it's been around a few hundred years. How democratic is it having a House of Lords? Aristocratic inbreds making or breaking laws simply on the basis of birthright, for fuck's sake! You know, some of them only turn up once a year so they can claim their allowance. Nothing a guillotine couldn't put right!”